Selling Your Father’s Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West

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One thing had changed, though — the Nimiipuu had accepted, from the outside world at least, a new name. French Canadian trappers, noting that some men of the tribe had adopted the coastal practice of piercing their noses (often with shells), had started calling the villagers Nez Percé, which was soon democratized to Nez Perce (rhyming with ‘fez verse’). As was often the case, the name proved much more resilient than the fashion, and ‘Nez Perce’ stuck.

Around 1824 the Bostons returned to the plateau with a vengeance, muscling in on the British market with all the vigour of an invasive coffee-shop chain. Introductory special offers of over-the-top payments for furs and horses lured away loyal customers, and the Americans’ more informal treatment of the Indians forged stronger friendships than the well-practised colonial disengagement of the British. A less honourable marketing device also began to flood the plateau — whiskey. While the British Empire could scarcely be described as a temperate endeavour, the New Republic was lubricated to a quite unprecedented degree: by one 1830 estimate, the average American adult was knocking back seven gallons of alcohol a year, and while the disastrous impact of this free-flowing intoxicant on Indian cultures was well known by the 1820s, the federal ban on trading whiskey with the tribes was of marginal significance several thousand miles from Washington. In 1831 the dominant American trader in the Oregon Territory, William Sublette, hauled 450 gallons of whiskey into his premises on the plateau, claiming every drop was needed to sustain his staff of boatmen. As he did not, in fact, employ a single boatman, the destiny of the drink is unarguable — the highly profitable degradation of people and communities that were socially and, many claim, physiologically, unprepared for the ravages of the wicked water. Once again, geographical protection and a natural aloofness allowed the Nez Perce to protect their culture better than many other tribes, a fact reflected, paradoxically, in the many observations by trappers of the time that the dignity and integrity of the Nez Perce marked them out as the least Indian of the Indians -but they were being drawn ever closer to the ever more numerous Americans. From 1827, many Nez Perce men became regular attendees at Rendezvous, the notorious annual trade conference of fur trappers which one historian, writing in 1918, recalled as a carnival of ‘carousal and dissipation’. The trappers, fiercely independent adventurers in mythology, overworked salarymen in reality, would come in from their travails in the forests and icy streams to spend a few days blowing a year’s wages in the luxury of human company: ‘Men with impassive faces gambled at cards; flat liquor-kegs and whiskey bottles were opened and emptied; and scenes of wildest revelry followed. The Indians, not to be outdone by the white men, joined in the gambling, horse-racing and drunken quarrels.’

And as the British retreated from this unfamiliar new colonialism with their usual good grace — adopting a scorched-earth policy of overhunting to ensure they weren’t followed north — it became increasingly likely that the Oregon Territory would, before long, become part of the ever-expanding ‘alcoholic republic’ of the United States.

In this fur-trading era, the white arrivals were measured in the hundreds at most, their numbers insufficient fundamentally to disrupt Nez Perce life — but these visitors did bring with them the first barrages of what is now seen as the most effective, murderous weapon in the diminution of indigenous America. There are no records of wilful efforts to introduce disease to the people of the Northwest — it was ‘Back East’ that the British military commander, Lord Amherst, had ordered the mass-murderous delivery of smallpox-infected blankets to the Delaware people in 1763 — but the unwitting impact was no less disastrous. Once again, the Nez Perce were spared the worst — for now — but as smallpox, cholera and measles devastated the Blackfoot to their north-east, Columbia tribes to their west and Snake River tribes to their south, the sense of encroaching doom grew, as did the divisions among the tribe, with those who coveted the material benefits of trade with the Bostons increasingly at odds with those who were fast concluding that nothing good could be gained from engaging with the white man. In epidemiological terms, at the very least, the isolationists couldn’t have been more right — the wave of disease that swept ahead of the white settlement of the Americas is among humankind’s greatest catastrophes: the population of North, Central and South America fell by as much as two-thirds in the century following Columbus’ arrival, a loss of up to forty million souls. Some North American tribes buried three-quarters of their people within a couple of months of their first white visitor. As the geographer Jared Diamond made clear in 1988, there’s little contest between ‘guns, germs and steel’ when civilizations fight for survival, the microscopic proving the most potent of the three by far. Diamond did, however, neglect to list the most cancerous and tenacious of all the implements of territorial conquest — gods.

Precisely why four Nez Perce men travelled to St Louis in the summer of 1831 and asked for a copy of the Bible is still fiercely contested. Some historians suggest they encountered this seemingly desirable source of the white man’s power at Rendezvous; others believe they were jealous of the two young male members of the nearby Kootenai and Salish tribes, who had been rented from their families by the Hudson’s Bay Company and sent to boarding school, whence they’d returned in collars and ties, speaking English, reciting the Ten Commandments and humming ‘Amazing Grace’. Yet others suggest that a local prophet had foreseen the arrival of the white man and his great book as heralding the end of this world and the start of a better one, while some modern Nez Perce are keen to revise the spiritual motivation altogether: ‘They didn’t go there for the Bible,’ contends tribal historian Allen Pinkham. ‘They went to learn how to communicate with written words. They wanted the technology of writing, not the Christian faith. We already knew about the Creator. We had our own faith.’

Whatever they wanted, they didn’t get. Two of the men died in St Louis, the other two on the journey home, all unable to resist a city of unfamiliar illnesses. But their mission did cause a sensation — they met their old friend William Clark (perhaps taking the time to let him know that, as a result of his relationship-building endeavours back in 1806, a red-haired Nez Perce was now entering his twenty-fifth year) and visited a Catholic church, while newspapers and Christian societies all the way to the East Coast marvelled at the thought of four ‘Red Men’ wandering through St Louis in full regalia, displaying their manifest hunger for the word of God. A call for missionaries to answer their plea rang out, with this letter to the New York Christian Advocate typically understated: ‘How deeply touching is the circumstance of the four natives travelling on foot 3,000 miles through thick forests and extensive prairies, sincere searchers after truth!…Let the Church awake from her slumbers and go forth in her strength to the salvation of these wandering sons of our native forests.’ For the Nez Perce, this salvation would come in the less than beatific form of the Reverend Henry Spalding.

Photographs of Henry Harmon Spalding are incomplete without a scowl. He was a man of fierce and unforgiving temper, his character a primal soup of vanity and spite, arrogance and churlishness. He may well have fancied that the greasy comb-over dominating the top half of his head and the rampant beard obscuring the bottom half lent him the appearance of a Sistine god; in fact he looks almost precisely as unappealing as his historical legacy. Not surprisingly, this old-fashioned bastard, born of an uncaring mother and an indeterminate father, was unlucky in love, and his routinely black mood can scarcely have been lightened by the companionship, on his 1836 mission to minister to the Nez Perce, of the woman who had broken his heart. Narcissa, travelling with her husband Marcus Whitman, had once rejected Spalding’s hand in marriage but by 1836 he had recovered somewhat and acquired a match, Eliza, who made up the westward-bound foursome, all forced to share a single tent for the entire trip. After two earlier attempts to open a mission in Nez Perce country failed, this unlikely double date was heading to Rendezvous in the hope of meeting the tribes which had sent their emissaries to St Louis, then following them home to establish ministries within their villages. On reaching Rendezvous, the two white women caused a sensation among the attendant natives, most, perhaps even all, of whom had never seen a female Boston, and competition erupted as to which tribe would take these dainty and prestigious visitors home. Ultimately, it was decided that the Whitmans would go and live with the Cayuse in the Walla Walla Valley, while the Spaldings would follow the Nez Perce home, the good reverend demanding, in a sign of things to come, that the Nez Perce clear a path through the forest for his wagon, rather than force his wife into the indignity of riding on a horse.

‘What is done for the poor Indians of this western world must be done soon. The only thing that can save them from annihilation is the introduction of civilisation.’ With that self-proclaimed motto, Spalding launched into the agricultural and technological salvation of the Nez Perce with as much vim as he devoted to his spiritual duties. He dug irrigation trenches, ploughed fields and used the power of the Clearwater River to run a wood saw and flour mill, encouraging the Nez Perce to adopt these new skills, becoming farmers and cattlemen rather than hunters and gatherers. He built a substantial loghouse — or, rather, made the Nez Perce build it for him, then made them take it apart and rebuild it on a spot with a cooler breeze — and set up a schoolroom in which Eliza taught English. The initial response was enthusiastic, with the promise of the secrets of the Good Book and the revelation of labour-saving innovations drawing villages from around the homeland to make camp near Spalding’s settlement at Lapwai on the Clearwater. One of the most influential village leaders, Tuekakas, brought his people to winter at Lapwai each year, returning during summer to their favoured lands in the isolated Wallowa Valley on the western fringe of the Nez Perce territory. He studied the Bible as deeply as the language barrier with Spalding allowed, and was baptized with a Christian name, Joseph. Later, his son would also take the same name. But Tuekakas’ loyalty to Spalding and the Bible were soon tested, as the man and his mission began to disturb and divide the Nez Perce.

The Reverend Henry H. Spalding.

Spalding’s insistence on using a horsewhip to encourage his hosts to labour was one of his earliest transgressions — a humiliation for people raised in a culture that emphasized human dignity — but there were many more. He began to insist that converted Nez Perce should cut their hair, take to western dress and abandon all their traditional faiths and rites, including their wyakin. He began to reveal dark and confusing inconsistencies in his preaching, drawing diagrams of the Presbyterian path to Heaven and the Catholic path to Hell. Strangest of all, when a government agent arrived at the mission in 1843, he and Spalding drew up a list of laws for the Nez Perce to live by, and Spalding hung a metal hoop from a tree to facilitate whippings for the new ‘crimes’, many of which the Nez Perce had been committing for centuries, such as borrowing one another’s food. Spalding and the agent also trampled over Nez Perce concepts of freedom and community by naming a ‘head chief of the tribe, an insubstantial young man called Ellis (Tuekakas and other more senior village leaders were initially bemused and irritated by this seemingly pointless gesture, but within years its capacity for devastation would become clear).

Thus the voices of dissent towards Spalding’s way grew ever stronger. Elder spiritual leaders questioned the wisdom of scarring Mother Earth with a plough, forcing her to work rather than simply accepting her gifts; stories abounded that the great diseases which had destroyed neighbouring tribes had arrived as a punishment for similar violence towards the soil. They also questioned Spalding’s new devices, the mills and the saws, as insults to the way of life that the Creator had specifically given to the Nez Perce to preserve. In their support was the swirl of rumours brought back from buffalo hunts to the east, of what had happened to other tribes who had welcomed the missionaries — invasion, settlement, displacement, destitution.

For the many Nez Perce who had settled into the new regime, though, this was backwardness and heresy. Spalding’s way offered less strenuous and time-consuming sources of food, the possibility of wealth through trade and, most importantly, the guaranteed avoidance of eternal suffering in the fiery netherworld of which the reverend spoke so often. Learning English, cutting their hair, keeping pigs, reciting chapter and verse, the Christian Nez Perce were a roaring success — but by an entirely different measure to their traditional clansmen.

By the measure of the ignoble history of colonial missionary work, Henry Spalding was certainly a success. By 1843, profound and insoluble conflicts were beginning to appear in the Nez Perce community, scuppering their response to the next, decisive, wave of white arrivals. In June 1843 around a thousand people set off from the town of Independence on the banks of the Missouri, to make the 1900-mile wagon journey in search of free land and new lives in the Oregon Territory. After division, comes conquest.

Dancers at the Tamkaliks Celebration, Wallowa Valley, Oregon.